Maya (40 page)

“I will never forget this lama,” the geshe said with conviction, as he leaned forward to offer me more chai. “He is a very intelligent man.”

He finished pouring and paused, as if weighing how best to continue. And then, for no apparent reason, he abruptly switched from Hindi to heavily accented English. “But you must understand . . .” Still bent over my full cup, the thermos held aloft, he looked me square in the eye and lowered his voice. “Nortul Rinpoche is
eunuch
.”

I stared at Dorje Sherap, who returned my blank look with a portentous widening of his own eyes.

The smell of
tukpa
wafted up through the bars of his open window. Lunch was being prepared in the courtyard. From the temple nearby I heard the monotonous drone of chanting, the clear ring of a bell used in tantric rituals.

For God's sake
, I remember thinking,
why is the man telling me this?
The
sudden shift out of Hindi had taken me by surprise. But this business about Nortul Rinpoche being a eunuch was something else altogether. I was aware of such practices in China, where beginning around the eighth century, emperors retained castrated slaves as guards in their harems. This had apparently continued up until the end of the Ching dynasty in 1912. In fact, I had read somewhere that as late as 1960, there were still a small number of Ching eunuchs living in Beijing. And then, of course, there are the Hijra in India, who undergo ritual castration in an operation called—bizarrely—
nirvan
, the Hindi for nirvana. But I had no idea until this moment that the custom played any part in Tibetan culture.

“You mean . . .” I, too, switched to English now, and the words felt weirdly intimate. I waved two fingers more or less in the direction of my balls and snipped them open and shut, like scissors.

He raised one eyebrow a bit, contemplating the significance of my gesture. After a second or two he repeated exactly what he had just said, this time shaping the English syllables with extreme care, in an obvious effort to drive his point home. “Nortul Rinpoche is
eunuch
.” As before, he laid considerable stress on the last word. His tone was decidedly ominous. “I want only warn you.”

He tipped the thermos upright, shoved in the plastic cork, and drove it home with a swift thump from the heal of his palm. Once secure, it was replaced on the table.

I let my hand drop to my lap in astonishment. “Warn me?”

“Yes,” he replied. “This lama, he like play funny trick sometime.”

“What kind of funny trick?” I hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“
Drupnyen
kind of trick. You know?” He studied my face, perhaps trying to determine if I grasped his meaning, which I did not. “Is many years alone in cave.” He folded both hands in his lap, one palm on top of the other, and sat up straight, back rigid, as if meditating. “Big yogi power.” His jaw hung slack, eyes wide open and staring blankly out into space, as if he were gazing right through the wall. The effect was disturbing.

I nodded dumbly, unable to imagine any other response.

“
Eunuch
, yes. No doubt. But good scholar. Very good scholar. And in Delhi he tell me very interest in learn English. He speak more English . . .” He hesitated, apparently unable to find the right expression. “Uh, more English . . .”

“More English
than you?
” I interjected.

“Yes, yes,” he nodded vigorously. “More
than you
. Rinpoche speak English good, but still he very interest learn more. You go Delhi and see him. I give you letter.”

He reached over and picked up a pen and paper from the table and set down a short note in Tibetan introducing me to Nortul Rinpoche, which he folded carefully and thrust into my hand, gently pressing my fingers closed around it.

31

H
OLI
,
THE GREAT
I
NDIAN FESTIVAL
of renewal, is celebrated every year on the vernal equinox in March. It is one of the archetypal “spring fertility rites” documented, most famously, by Sir James Frazer. In Europe, as Christianity supplanted earlier pagan cultures, the cruder elements of the old symbolism were displaced by the Easter story of Jesus's death and resurrection; nowadays all that remains in the West of that long-forgotten past are bunnies and colored eggs. In India, though, Holi still proudly bears the marks of its prehistoric origin in a complex of rituals invoking blood, sex, and death. It is a day where normal social hierarchies are turned on their head, a day, I was told, when caste and gender discrimination is overturned and people are free to meet as equals and friends.

I had first experienced Holi the previous spring, when I was living in the rented room in New Delhi. Mahmud urged me to go to the old city, where—according to him—the holiday was celebrated in proper style. “In my neighborhood,” he boasted, smiling broadly, “on the day of Holi the women
beat
the men.”

“But why would they do that?” I objected. Without waiting for his answer I continued, “And anyway, it's not a Muslim holiday.” In a seminar on Hindu festivals at Chicago, we had read an article explaining that Holi is associated with the worship of the Hindu god Krishna.

“Go there and see for yourself,” was his laconic response.

So I did. Just after sunrise on the morning of Holi, I caught an auto rickshaw to Old Delhi.

I had the driver take me around behind Jamma Masjid and drop me off at the entrance to one of the many narrow alleyways that wound their way deep into the bowels of the neighborhood near Chandni Chowk. Normally, even this early in the day, there would have been people everywhere, but on this particular morning—the morning of Holi—the streets were uncannily quiet. I set off, somewhat apprehensively, into the labyrinth. I had been walking for maybe three minutes when, no more than
a hundred feet ahead, four women rounded a corner. They were dressed in salwar kameez and carrying knotted ropes. One of them immediately spotted me. I saw her stop short and grab the arm of the woman next to her, pointing in my direction. And then they were running toward me, cackling hysterically and twirling the ropes over their heads like rodeo cowgirls. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I stood there smiling stupidly in anticipation of an interesting cross-cultural experience.

Within seconds the women surrounded me and lashed out with their ropes. I ducked low and threw up my arms in an effort to protect my head and face. The coarsely woven hemp fell hard across my thin cotton shirt, the knots biting painfully into my flesh. It was like having BB guns fired point-blank against my exposed back. I involuntarily cried out—playfully, at first, but very soon in dead earnest—for them to stop. In response to my protests, the four women closed ranks, forming a tight circle with me at the center, all of us revolving around in some mad contra dance as I dodged and shuffled to avoid the stinging blows. At last I shoved them aside, pushing my way violently through the ring, and sprinted back in the direction I'd come. I made it to the open street and kept running, without looking back. At the taxi stand across from the Red Fort I caught a motor rickshaw back to New Delhi. For a good week afterward my flesh was ornamented with ugly, red welts, souvenirs of my first Holi.

Now, in Banaras, I received repeated assurances that ritual beatings were
not
part of the celebration. Quite the contrary. Everyone told me that the women of the holy city did not dare to go out in public on the morning of Holi; the streets were too dangerous for any female of marriageable age.

In the weeks leading up to the festival in Banaras, I watched with interest as massive piles of combustible materials accumulated in the center of every major intersection in the city. Scraps of lumber and the splintered limbs of saplings were heaped up along with broken furniture, old tires, and various other detritus—anything vaguely flammable was tossed on.

Every child in the city was anxious to tell me the story of Holika, the evil daughter of King Hiranyakashyap, how she had accidentally cremated herself in the attempt to murder her husband. Some people said that her effigy would be fixed atop the fire on the eve of Holi. Others insisted that it was not Holika but Putana who would be sacrificed to the flames. Putana was a witch who had tried to kill the baby Krishna by offering him
her breast filled with poison milk; the divine infant had sucked her dry, and the elated villagers burned her carcass. There were other stories as well, all sorts of fanciful tales about villains and hubristic demigods. No one seemed to really care that the various accounts didn't match up. The point was simply that there would be bonfires all over the city and crowds of people watching as
someone
went up in flames.

As Banaras prepared for Holi, All India Radio blared from every chai shop, the voices full of nothing but the coming election and how it would bring an end to Indira's Emergency. And then, in mid-March, we heard that two shots had been fired at Sanjay Gandhi's jeep. He was campaigning somewhere in the rural areas north of Delhi when the attack took place, and despite his entourage of guards, the shooter somehow managed to escape. Surprisingly, everyone I talked with was convinced that this apparent assassination attempt had been staged by Indira herself in order to gain sympathy for her favorite son. If so, then the plot failed miserably; people now seemed to hate the man even more than they had before.

One afternoon, riding my bicycle through the busy intersection at Belapur, I noticed that a rustic human scarecrow had been fastened upright atop the mountainous pile of accumulated combustibles. Affixed to its face was a plastic mask with Sanjay's trademark bushy sideburns and square black glasses. There he perched, high above the snarl of traffic, a man of stuffed straw dressed in white kurta-pajama, his head tilting ineffectually to one side, arms drooping in the afternoon heat.

As the holiday grew near, vendors multiplied everywhere along the edges of the city's streets. Rows of enterprising men, women, and children squatted behind precise, conical piles of brightly colored powders and an array of esoteric Holi paraphernalia. The most popular item appeared to be the
pichkari
—a type of giant syringe capable of propelling streams of liquid dye some ten or twenty feet through the air. Local sweet shops displayed racks of gujia, mathri, and other Holi delicacies. Thandai, the special Holi drink, a kind of marijuana milkshake, was readily available at the bhang shops in Godowlia crossing and also at most of the city's myriad chai stalls. Whipped up with little paddles twirled between two flat palms, thandai was obviously going to serve as the launching pad for all the mayhem to follow.

Clearly, this was going to be a major deal.

* * *

As promised, on the eve of Holi the mounds of debris at every intersection were soaked in gasoline and torched, the thandai flowed freely, and all hell broke loose in the Forest of Bliss. The revelry continued unabated through the night; by next morning when I finished breakfast, a significant percentage of the city's population appeared to have gone genuinely insane. Given my experience in Delhi, I decided that it would be in my best interest to observe the festivities from the relatively safe confines of my second-story room. As I watched through the window, men and gangs of prepubescent children galloped through the street below, untamed and howling with glee. They assaulted each other with pichkaris and handfuls of powder that erupted, filling the air with dense clouds of aquamarine, chartreuse, and indigo.

I spent the first half of the morning trying to read Sanskrit, while just next door the entire female wing of the Bengali family was on the rooftop upending buckets of tinted water onto anyone unlucky enough to pass below. My girlfriend was out there with the rest of them having the time of her life. Since the recent business with the monkeys our relationship had cooled down, but I still nurtured a terrible crush. She seemed particularly gorgeous as she threw herself unselfconsciously into their games. It was impossible not to watch. I finally gave up trying to work and went outside on my veranda to get a better view.

A raucous crowd of drunken BHU students was at that very moment marching up the street in our direction from Assi Ghat. Above their heads towered a colossal papier-mâché model of an erect phallus next to a signboard depicting Indira Gandhi having anal sex with Morarji Desai, the Janata Party's candidate for prime minister. He was an eighty-year-old best known for consuming a glass of his own urine every day during the months of his imprisonment—apparently it was some kind of Ayurvedic regimen. The artist had done a remarkably good job. Indira was portrayed bent over with her sari hiked up around her waist exposing a huge ass, amply suited to the formidable dimensions of Morarji's penis. As the disorderly throng of students moved within range, torrents of color spilled forth from above. The mob scattered in every direction, cursing and shaking their fists at my neighbors, who were shrieking in delight. At that moment a clump of cow shit flew up from below and struck the wall behind me with a loud slap.

“
Aray, bhosadi-wala, zara gobar khaa lo!
”

It was Mickey.

“Eat shit,” he bellowed in Hindi, “you lover of large cunts!”

I hardly recognized him at first. The women had obviously scored a direct hit, and he was completely drenched. The colors blended in a mélange of fantastic streaks that streamed through his hair and down over his face. His clothes were awash in the same riotous palate. He looked like some bizarre hallucination rising out of the jungles of Vietnam, a soldier in psychedelic camouflage.

“Stan!” he bellowed. “Come on down,
bhaiya
! You're missing all the fun!”

I shook my head, slowly and unequivocally. From somewhere off to my left another ball of cow shit flew up out of the crowd, traversing the air in a wide arc. I ducked and it soared over my shoulder and straight into my room, where it landed with a wet
plop
on the floor beside my bed. I scrambled inside and slammed shut the veranda door.